Bloody Courage chapter 7
by Zack Gregson
Summary: The penultimate part of Courage's trip through nostalgia as he begins to uncover the reason for the destruction of the Bagg farm and his only home.


**Chapter 7**

**How Many Stairs Must A Dog Fall Down**

And with that, Courage felt the familiarity of depression sink into his mind once again. Holding the spectacles gently now, he felt the memory hit him with the same force of his own wretched howl.

_But you cannot blame yourself, Courage. _The Starmaker tried to soothe him as the dog went down on his knees, his small body shaking hard, his chest feeling so cloying and full of misery, like tar choking him to death. She knew that this would happen, the result of that crime Courage felt he had done. She had seen snatches of it in his mind and pieced it together in her own. She just wished the jigsaw of the memory gave her a different picture. _Courage...please, you can't put yourself in guilt._

YES I CAN! And I will, because I KNOW it was all because of me!

He couldn't bear with this insufferable guilt, no matter how much he felt he deserved it. He needed pain. He wanted the reality he knew to hit him as hard as it could. He wanted it over with as fast as possible and as soon as possible, like the small child waiting for the school bully to deal with him and get it over with. In this time he knew now that prolonging agony and running away from it did no good if it was eventual. You...you never knew what it was like to be with her. Even if you can read my mind, and my memories, you'll never know the feeling of being with her like I did. She...she was an angel...an angel I always lay at the feet of, bowed to her, prayed to her even, for love, food and to never be homeless again. And...and what did I give in return? His eyes squinted as hard as possible until they became merely mountainous wrinkles either side of his snout, water barely pushing out from them, desperate to escape. I...I...I... he couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. The worst thing he was thinking in his mind, was that he caused Muriel's death. He knew certainly that he had caused Eustace's death, though in truth he was not sorry to have caused that. He was sorry for doing such a thing to Muriel, to have split away the bond of love they somehow must've shared. Not that he ever understood how a sweet woman that of Celtic charm personified the word "homely" in every possible way would ever marry a cynical greedy egocentric unappreciative shitface like Eustace.

But the dog felt he had no right to judge so. He was a dog then and a dog now, and he knew that his place was below them.

Yet...Muriel fought against that. She made him feel equal to her. The Starmaker intervened his musings of lament.

_Courage...do you even know if you did cause such an act? All you have are broken memories inside you. If all you see are a few broken pieces left on a mirror, that does not mean you can see your entire face. Do you understand?_

Y...yes. But...I know I did something bad here. Something...evil. I don't know what I did, but I know...that Muriel died because of me...something happened to me, and it was all my fault.

_How can you be the judge of that, when your evidence is circumstantial? If you really want to punish yourself for your crimes, than you have to find the missing pieces, if you can._

That's what I'm trying to do! I...I'm trying to find pieces of my memory here, trying to piece them together. I know on that day, Muriel made those heavenly pies. I know I had been screaming a lot afterwards, I know I had a thick table leg in one hand like a baseball bat after I broke all the chairs and table legs...something in me...broke that day. And I know exactly who broke it. His jaw felt tighter now, slowly winding itself up as his mood became more inflamed in anger. Everytime he thought of Eustace, he could not stop feeling his rage flow through him. He also began to feel envious of himself back then...envious that he felt the joy of murdering that godforsaken old bastard. How it must've felt to smack that wood into his skull and beat him over and over again...but...what if Muriel saw it?

How would she have felt, to see her own loyal pet murder her husband? Would she secretly be shocked but elated? Frightened and sad? If he had upset Muriel somehow, not even hurting Eustace would be worth it if that was the catch. Not to Courage.

He collected himself together gently, his body shaking from the pouring of tears, feeling dehydrated and weak at the knees. If he vomited now, he'd probably pass out. He shook his head softly to recollect himself, before walking out of the bathroom.

M...maybe there's another clue somewhere. he said softly, lest he awaken the spirits here that must've been restless from his howling torment. He still kept the blood-stained glasses with him. The angel's broken glass and the devil's spilt blood in one paw clasped together. It felt strange of the dog but he knew Muriel was an angel and Eustace was not.

The two walked back down the stairs to the living room. Courage knew that he had to be absolutely certain of what he had done, even though the shadow of guilt was casting itself over his heart, cloying and darkening its view. Courage remembered from the flashback that Eustace was in his chair when he was planning to beat him. So he investigated the chair. Most of its scent was all fire, ash and burnt upholstery. But he continued to sniff it, a nasal quest. Sure enough he smelt the underlying trace of Eustace, and by a long-developed instinct his hair stood up on end. He shook that instinct away and continued, sniffing more of the man's tangy sweaty scent, a bitter odour like one of those bitter spices. And then, he smelt something even stranger. It was...metallic, yet sickly. Sniffing over a particular spot, he then smelt a familiar scent. Taking up Muriel's glasses, he tried to ignore Muriel's sweeter smell, of pastry and berries, to probe at the blood on the glasses. There was no doubt about it.

_He could see it now in his head. He had walked up to Eustace and saw that face he felt his mother should've slapped at birth. Or maybe she did. Courage growled at the man and began to think "all these years...you never liked me for sharing Muriel's love...you HATE sharing, don't you Eustace? Well...now it's time for you to learn something new. I'm not so stupid anymore." And with that, Courage had leaped up the armchair and the look of miserable contempt turned into a look of surprise. The first blow sounded so sweet to Courage's ears, a thwack of wood against wrinkled flesh followed by Eustace yelping in pain. And why should he stop? The dog merely raised the table leg again and smacked onto Eustace's head. One right at his face, batting for Bagg, go for the home run, dog, go for the home run. He felt hallucinations throwing through his mind, an audience cheering for him to make his star run, the table leg now a slugger, as he slammed into the back of the man's head. He slumped forward. But that wasn't enough._

_Courage lifted up the old man's chin with one single claw, and winded up his last bat._

_But he didn't get his last batting chance. Eustace had grabbed for the dog's throat, his strength weak but his hand strong from years of farm labour. The dog felt the thin bony fingers tighten around him as the old man growled at him. "Stupid dog...crazy bastard gone rabid...gotta kill rabid dogs so they don't spread..." In a way, Eustace was right. Courage had gone rabid. Mentally at least. He saw the old face up close and that hat brim over his weedy little spectacles. The man was strong, he was starting to really crush the dog's larynx as Courage's eyes started to become whiter than before, his tongue hanging wetly out...he needed to distract him...the hat. That...precious hat._

Courage nearly fell back onto the floor from this one. The memory was successfully triggered but he had not expected Eustace's strength now or then. He was on his knees holding his throat tenderly to suck back in air he believed he lost. The Starchaser fidgeted nervously on top of the dog, worried for these memories and their effect on the dog. She needed him alive and well, and strong enough to fight. If his mind became any more tortured, she would never be sure if his mentality would be strong enough to withstand the Chickens. But she had to trust him, give him hope. He would not leave this farm until he found his truth.

_Courage...your memory...it was focusing on the hat. Where do you think it is?_

Uhh...I...I dunno. But...maybe if we find it-

_Then we unlock more of your memory, yes, exactly what I was thinking._ At this point, Courage had to ask something of the Starchaser. He looked up by an instinct at her and asked:

Hey...umm, why can't I ask you to go into my memory and unlock them?

_Ohh...no no, that would be too risky. There are an awful lot of things in your mind, and some things I find are more disturbing than others. You have a lot of locked doors in here. Like a prison, a prison for your own suffering of sorts. I don't want to try unlocking any of them without knowing what memories I would be opening. I'm sorry, Courage. I don't want to hurt you._

It's alright...I'll learn them by myself. The objective he had now was to find Eustace's hat. That brown flatcap with the bent front handle looming over the old man's face like a rock precipice over the cliff face. The hat was of some great importance in the memory and possibly may be the activation for the sequel of that memory, to find out not only what happened to Eustace, but also get closer to the cause of Courage's own ruination.

Firstly, the chair had fallen backwards, so he began there. The hat had a distinct scent of old worn leather and the sweat of Eustace merged together. A combination such as that should not prove too hard to find. It was also the farmer's most prized possession, one he would never give up over his dead body. Courage feared he may have proved that literally. The dog began to guide himself mentally through the house in the past. He had been to the kitchen, living room, all the upstair rooms...but...not downstairs. The basement.

Looking at the base of the stairs was a doorway, leading into the basement underneath the house, the very foundations of the building that while a torn effigy of its former self, still stood up like a skeleton on a wire.

One more room...if I can't find anything in there...then there's nothing left.

_And if you do find something?_ asked the Starmaker.

Then...there's nothing left there either.

And so he began to walk towards the basement entrance. The door had been busted inwards and was flat against the wall on its bare hinges, flattened and entombed within this open passageway. The stairs were much weaker here than the ones that led up. The fourth step Courage took down even broke under his weight and he almost fell had the Starmaker not clutched the banister and pulled him back. He muttered a thank you and took more careful steps, as graceful as a timid ballerina, before he finally reached the basement floor. It was cool and black like the rest of the room, shielded by the harsh sun of the dustbowl by the harder wooden floor above, which amazingly withstood the fire-

_And then someone fell. Fell down the stairs, head over lanky heels while clutching something tightly in pained thin arms, an anorexic snowball of flesh hurtling down to smack against the wall. The dog followed after, running down the stairs in a desperate mixture of anger and glee as he stood above the head of Eustace, bleeding from the fall. He still clutched the hat in his bony fingers. The hat had fallen near the stairs. To Courage, it was a sign of release._

_You kicked me down ever since I came here, he heard his past self say with a strange twinge in his tone, now it's my turn to kick you down. Courage grabbed the slack of Eustace's dungarees and slowly dragged him across the room...because there was one thing that he always wanted to do with that goddamn hat._

This flashback not only proved to Courage that there was one more room left for him, but also that he was at last coming to the end of his amnesiac journey. Looking towards the other corner of the room, he saw the only thing in the basement of noteworthy attention.

A pot-bellied black pewter boiler.

The dog gulped with the fear of many a possibility multiplying ever onwards in his mind, filling his head with so many paranoiac reasons that were both logical and illogical that it began to hurt his mind, feeling it would burst with so many conclusions.

But by the time he had reached the boiler (and as he was walking towards it, he felt pains other than in his mind), he smelt an old scent. A scent he knew was triggering another flashback...but not yet. It laid there in anticipation like a cat eyeing a mouse, waiting to strike at the right moment. The boiler door was closed and it looked even darker than he had remembered it, with even the white spackle of pewter stone seemingly swallowed by the mineral abyss. He shakily reached out to open the boiler door, feeling oddly warm, and with a screeching creak of warning, it opened up to reveal a pile of ash. Ash that among its own overloading scent, carried off another scent.

The dog began to shovel it out with his bare hands, feeling stingy but warm in his paws, before he felt something not like ash at all...something...dusty...leathery...and below that something hard and smooth...pulling both out, he could only fall back in shock at the sight that made his memory arise like the phoenix from the ashes.


End file.
